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As Széchenyi well knew, modernization and what we now refer to as "technology transfer" had enormous—and not always happy—implications for its beneficiaries. Above all, it had implications for the old order of society, as Samuel Smiles, that complacent apologist for progress and bourgeois values, made clear in his life of the railway engineer, George Stephenson. "It was some time," he wrote drily, "…before the more opulent classes, who could afford to post to town in aristocratic style, became reconciled to railway travelling. The old families did not relish the idea of being conveyed in a train of passengers of all ranks and conditions, in which the shopkeeper and the peasant were carried along at the same speed as the duke and the baron—the only difference being in price. It was another deplorable illustration of the levelling tendencies of the age." #1 Such attitudes may have been typical of a reactionary British élite, but it is interesting to see the specifically Magyar spin put on them by a visiting Hungarian, Ferenc Pulszky, as he contemplated the democratic fall-out (and financial excesses) of the first railway boom on his visit to England in 1836. In his diary he wrote of his fears that "the age of the railway may also become the age of superficiality, and that instead of love of the fatherland, there will be a levelling cosmopolitanism." He found much to admire in Britain—more than he expected, given the preconceptions with which he arrived, fully expecting to be confronted with a land where "utilitarianism rules", one far too like America, which he calls "the fatherland of egoism… a republic on Bentham’s model where the spirit is oppressed, life loses its greatest charm, its shining colours, and everything ends in surfeit." While he admires London (but chiefly because of its green parks with cattle grazing in them), Manchester is "wreathed in thick factory smoke, like a city on fire, the sparsely windowed houses depressing, anything more noble extinguished by the oppression of the steam machines"; in the city’s spinning factories, these machines "all but made workmen dispensable." #2 This is the sceptical spirit to be found also in the attitudes of Lajos Kossuth, and powerfully expressed in his speech to the new Hungarian Parliament in February 1848: Hungary, he says (quoting Isaac Newton), should "emulate the dwarf that grows taller and sees further than the giant himself on whose shoulder he has climbed … our nation—though backward—may profit from the experiences of other nations; let us avoid following them in everything, and endeavour to avoid their mistakes." #3

In Britain, concern about the social consequences of the industrial revolution were expressed both on the left and the right of politics (by the Chartists on behalf of the exploited workers, by a conservative radical like William Cobbett who lamented the despoliation of England, the growth of cities at the expense of the countryside and the materialistic greed of the new rich).

Likewise in feudal Hungary, the obiter dicta of the two towering figures in the politics of the Reform Age, Count István Széchenyi and Lajos Kossuth, demonstrate the extent to which both were aware of the social costs involved in the modernization process. In particular they were sensitive to the obliteration of the personal ties characteristic of feudalism and their substitution by the anonymity and anomie engendered by systems of greater economic efficiency. After all, children working down the mines was hardly a humanitarian improvement on the feudal exploitation of labourers. Nevertheless, there are clear distinctions in the attitudes of the two men, distinctions that ultimately led not only to them proposing markedly different solutions to Hungary’s problems, but also to an irreversible personal split between them, which highlighted the historically grounded dilemma in which Hungary found itself at this time.

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Whether or not that was really the case, it is clear that the influence of speculative freemasonry, which had spread from England to the continent in the early and mid-18th century, had provided the impetus for the reconsideration of some of the most treasured assumptions about the Hungarian constitution and about governance in general. A large number of intellectual Hungarian aristocrats had become adherents of freemasonry, including such leading figures as Draskovich, Erdoýdy, Festetics, Batthyány, Podmaniczky, Csáky and even Széchenyi‘s ultra-loyal father as a young man. Like his son, he found himself torn between loyalty to the Emperor (although he resigned all his official posts in 1786, when Joseph II began consistently to ignore the constitution) and his Hungarian patriotism. #4 The Masonic Constitutional System of Liberty, drawn up by Draskovich in the 1770‘s and heavily influenced by the ideas of Montesquieu, seems to have won his complete approval.

The British Grand Lodge, founded in 1717, approved and strongly influenced continental lodges until the Berlin one was set up in 1740, possibly as a device of Frederick the Great to gain influence in Central and Eastern Europe. Nonetheless, as Margaret Jacob has pointed out, German freemasons in the 1780‘s still identified "our freedom [as] the tradition of the British nation", a tradition which "embodied British cultural values associated with the potentially subversive religious toleration, relaxed fraternizing among men of mixed and widely disparate social backgrounds, an ideology of works and merit, and not least of constitution and elections." #5 This somewhat romanticized picture (the bitter struggle for Catholic emancipation in Ireland gives a truer picture of British "religious tolerance") nevertheless illustrated how deep the rosy picture of the English polity painted by Montesquieu had sunk into the consciousness of continental Europe. It is perhaps in the context of these attributes, or supposed attributes, that a leading mason, József Podmaniczky, (according to a secret police report) secretly offered the Hungarian throne to an English duke in 1788, if the Habsburgs could be successfully toppled. (It ought to be said, however, that offering the Hungarian throne around was then in fashion: Louis Philippe d‘Orléans, a possible ruler of a projected independent Austrian Netherlands, had also been considered, as was Duke Karl August of Weimar. The latter was tempted to accept, until a magisterial blast from Goethe put him back on the straight and narrow). #6

The disillusion of the multi-talented József Podmaniczky with Emperor Joseph II, under whom he had made a glittering career as a Lutheran from the gentry class promoted to a baronetcy in the hope of winning over potentially troublesome elements, was doubtless sealed, if not determined, by Joseph’s Freemasonry Patent of 1785. This subjected the free-thinking masons to central, indeed to police supervision. Joseph (who had once been suspected of being a mason himself, his father Franz Stefan of Lorraine, having been initiated in 1733 at the English ambassador‘s residence at The Hague) thereby destroyed much of the good will engendered by his enlightened Tolerance Patent of 1781. This had extended religious tolerance to Protestants, fomerly banned from the imperial civil service under the terms of the Carolina Resolutio. Since about a third of the Hungarians were Protestant, it comes as no surprise to find that there was also a Protestant preponderance in Hungarian freemasonry in the 1770‘s and 1780‘s; of the one thousand or so members of Hungarian lodges, three-quarters were landed gentry, for the most part either Lutheran or Calvinist. #7 As George Barany points out, Protestantism actually came to be identified with the very notion of reform, insofar as Catholic conservatives were to refer to the "Reform Party" and the "Protestant Party" interchangeably, when commenting on the proceedings of the Lower Diet between 1832 and 1836. #8

Notwithstanding this clear connection with Protestantism, caution should be exercised about attributing too much direct British influence on Hungarian lodges. Religious tolerance was an issue fundamental to continental masonry, yet only lip service was paid to it in the English lodges, whose members came from the hegemonical Protestant majority of the political establishment and did not bestir themselves on behalf of Catholic or Jewish emancipation. Theirs was a very different perspective from that of a Hungarian Protestant, who was part of an officially mistrusted minority—which probably explains why the Draskovich Observance mentioned above followed so closely the spirit of De L‘Esprit des Lois.

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Széchenyi himself, although a wealthy landowner, was refused credit by a Viennese bank shortly after the occurrence of one of the most notorious Hungarian financial scandals involving the powerful Count Grassalkovich, whose agents induced Viennese savers to invest in interest-bearing bonds in 1825 to raise two million forints on the collateral of the Grassalkovich estates. Given the bad reputation of Hungarian loans, special prospectuses were issued purporting to offer guarantees of repayment and interest and a Viennese bank underwrote the offer. Specifically, the Count undertook to forego the protection of Hungarian feudal law in case of dispute and to make himself accountable to an Austrian court. These assurances proved to be worthless. When the interest ceased after a couple of years, creditors found that the Viennese bank washed its hands of the matter; although a Viennese court found in their favour, Count Grassalkovich blandly invoked Hungarian law to refuse payment and was backed by the County. The latter even issued a judgement condemning the usurious practices of his creditors. #9 If this sort of behaviour was possible by one of the leading families of the land, one could be forgiven for thinking that many nobles were simply drones who dressed up their parasitic crookery in legal niceties and the rhetoric of patriotism. Although the Grassalkovich case was probably exceptional, it lends force to Széchenyi‘s heartfelt writings on the necessity of a ius cambio-mercantile, a mercantile code that would make commercial undertakings binding on participants. The usurious rates of interest of which Hungarian nobles self-righteously complained (e.g. Count Carl Andrásssy in Umrisse einer möglichen Reform in Ungarn—1833) were of course primarily the consequence of the high risk attached to dealing with a layer of society that had formed the law in its own image. Széchenyi‘s thinking reflects the insistence of Adam Smith that enlightened self-interest had come "to respect property rights and to regard the keeping of contractual promises as ‘reasonable expectations’... As commerce increased, there was a greater social need for honouring contractual promises, and a greater sense of disappointment felt by those subjected to broken promises. Contract law was a response to that need." #10

Apart from the above considerations, Hungarian agricultural reformers were hampered by the imperial revenue system which required the maintenance of mass peasant holdings on which the taxes were raised from which the nobility were exempt. The liberation of what nobles contemptuously called the misera plebs contribuens, and the spreading of the taxation burden, were items high on Széchenyi‘s agenda, and by the same token, the insistence that nobles should pay the toll on the projected Chain Bridge between Buda and Pest was of immense symbolic importance as representing an irreversible step in the direction of a civil society. Significantly, it was the Lord Chief Justice who burst out weeping when the institution of a toll was agreed by the Diet in 1835, correctly—from his point of view—forecasting that it would lead to the downfall of the Hungarian nobility and proclaiming that he would himself never cross the bridge as long as he lived. Nothing illustrates better than his reaction the point made by Bentham and Smith that laws generally reflected the interests of those who framed them, and all too often therefore offered a refuge for those who wished to circumvent natural justice. The lesser Hungarian nobility were indeed obsessed with law, and in the 1840‘s it was the proud boast of Pest "to possess more lawyers than Bohemia, Styria and Dalmatia combined." #11

If the feudal law was an obstacle to land transfer and innovation in agriculture, there was still the possibility of practical measures. In this respect the founding of the Georgikon in 1797 on the Keszthely estate of Széchenyi‘s uncle, Count György Festetics, was of considerable significance. Here a new spirit was evident, to counter the wasteful "slash and burn" mentality of traditional feudal agriculture, which had only been encouraged by the fact that Hungary was relatively rich in cultivable land per head of the population, and that under the one hundred and forty years of Turkish occupation much land (with no peasantry to work it) had been left to "rest". This apparent blessing was now also a spur to inefficiency, for if one strip was exhausted, it was often simply abandoned and an unworked one brought into cultivation. Inefficient cultivation meant that yields were low under the feudal system. The English agronomist, Arthur Young, spoke of producing 22 hectolitres of corn per hectare (2.471 acres) in 1770 on the best land in Britain, while the peasant farming of France was estimated to produce only 16 hl/ha; some thirty years later Germany with Central Europe were still said to be producing only some 10-11 hl/ha.

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In this last respect, the Anglo-Scottish contribution to European culture is of particular interest, and the position of Scotland culturally, politically and economically with regard to England has some thought-provoking implications for that of Hungary in the context of the Habsburg hegemony. David Hume, Adam Ferguson, Adam Smith and other giants of the Scottish Enlightenment were the products of a Presbyterian-based, democratically organized educational system coupled with the economic benefits that flowed from the Act of Union with England of 1707. As Jerry Muller has pointed out, their Calvinist heritage linked Scottish academe to the tradition of the great universities of the Netherlands, the Scottish development of Roman law brought its legal institutions closer to the continental legal framework than were those of England, while a historically determined tendency to draw inspiration from non-English sources, as well as links going back to "the auld alliance", created a powerful axis with the thinkers of the French Enlightenment. Scottish intellec-tuals were often more genuinely cosmopolitan than their English counterparts (the Grand Tour of English milords being more an Olympian survey of foreigners coupled with a little opportunistic antiquity purchasing); but theirs was a "provincial cosmopolitanism" implying a strong and pragmatic impulse for self-improvement.30 In other words, these "North Britons", as the Lowland Scots intelligentsia preferred to style itself, capitalized on their distinctive cultural traditions to bring something distinctive to the notion of "Britain" and "British", just as their descendants were to make a silk purse out of a sow’s ear by going out and running the British Empire, since they were denied the plum jobs in the English establishment. Perhaps it is no accident that the upwardly mobile Scot, Adam Clark, was the one who went abroad and grew in stature in his job as Baumeister, while his superior, the Englishman Tierney Clark, was content to be (and could afford to be) a stay-at-home administrator of the project. Equally it may be significant that Adam Clark nobly supported the cause of his adopted Hungary in the 1848 War of Independence, while Tierney Clark was notoriously contemptuous of it.

The North Britons were anxious to be distinguished from the folk museum of the Highlands on their back doorstep—it was usually Lowlanders who, as factors to the hated Dukes of Sutherland, were responsible for some of the most brutal of the so-called "clearances", when the feudal subsistence economy of the Highlands was being destroyed to make way for intensive sheep-runs, and whole clans were driven into exile in North America or the Antipodes. On the other hand, it was the Lowlander and antiquary, Sir Walter Scott, who rekindled the national myth of the Land of the Gaels that reinforced Scottish identity, succeeding in large measure in the invention of a Kulturvolk, despite the discredit potentially attaching to such an enterprise after the literary forgeries of Ossian. Much of Scott‘s almost unparalleled international success as an author, not least in Hungary, may be attributed to his achievement in re-inventing a nation that had lost its independent statehood, and doing so by invoking a historical continuity that upheld national dignity. Robert Walsh in his Narrative of a Journey from Constantinople to England (1832) encounters a bookseller in Transylvanian Hermannstadt(Nagyszeben/Sibiu) who has just placed a huge portrait on his wall of "Le sieur Valtere Skote, l‘homme le plus célčbre en toute l‘Europe". French and German translations of Scott‘s novels formed a sizeable part of his stock. #12 John Paget encountered an impoverished Jew on his Hungarian travels, who pulled from his pocket a well-thumbed German translation of Ivanhoe, assuring the Englishman that he had read many others of Scott‘s works and expressing profound dismay on learning that the great man was no longer alive. #13

From the point of view of a progressive conservative, Scott‘s genius lay in reconciling national aspirations with historical and political realities. His stage-management of George IV‘s visit to Scotland in 1822 managed to flatter all interested parties: the Highlanders with the myth that the roots of Scottish identity lay in the (substantially invented) culture of the Gael, the "North Britons" with an emphasis on their contribution to the British weal and the Hanoverian monarch with a show of loyalty and affection, which survived even the spectacle of the corpulent German libertine sporting a kilt. The kind of ingenious marriage of myth and political convenience that Scott pulled off was closer to the "synthesis of enlightened Empiricism and romantic nationalism" to be found in the thinking of Zsigmond Kemény and others of the "Literary Deák Party" than to Széchenyi‘s quasi-mystical Herderian idea of the individual nation‘s unique mission, still less the myopic populism of Kossuth.33 Interestingly, Kemény, who stood for "mediatory liberalism", was a popularizer of Lord Macaulay‘s intensely Whig-orientated, Protestant and materialistic History of England in Hungary, drawing lessons from it for his homeland in a long review of Antal Csengery‘s translation into Hungarian of the first part of the history, published in 1853. Baron Eötvös was also of this group and it was he who coined the pregnant phrase "peaceful co-existence" (békés együttélés), a pragmatic locution that suggested a way of reconciling national aspiration with political and economic reality long before it acquired its particularized twentieth century meaning. #14

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• 1 Cited in The Victorian Mind p. 118, and taken from Samuel Smiles: The Life of George Stephenson, Railway Engineer. Chapter XXV: "Advance of Public Opinion in Favour of the Railway".
• 2 Ferenc Pulszky: Aus dem Tagebuche eines in Großbritannien reisenden Ungarn. Pesth. 1837. pp. 2, 3, 101.
• 3 Quoted in É. H. Haraszti: "Contemporary Hungarian Reactions to the Anti-Corn Law Movement" in Acta Historica VIII Nos. 3–4, 1961. p. 397.
• 4 Éva H. Balázs: Hungary and the Habsburgs, 1765–1800. Budapest, London, New York, 1997, p. 305.
• 5 Margaret C. Jacob: Living the Enlightenment: Freemasonry and Politics in Eighteenth Century Europe. Oxford, 1991. p. 151.
• 6 For this information and that in the following paragraph I have drawn heavily on Éva H. Balázs‘s remarkable study Hungary and the Habsburgs: 1765–1800. See Note 11.
• 7 Éva H. Balázs: op cit. p. 43.
• 8 See George Barany: "The Liberal Challenge and its Limitations: The Religious Question at the Diet of 1843–1844." In: Hungary and European Civilisation, Ed. György Ránki. Budapest, 1989. p. 33.
• 9 For a coruscating account of this episode, see: B. G. Ivanyi: "From Feudalism to Capitalism: The Economic Background to Széchenyi‘s Reform in Hungary." Journal of Central European Affairs. Vol. 20, No. 1. 1960. pp. 282–284.
• 10 Jerry Z. Muller: Adam Smith in His Time and Ours. Princeton, 1993. p. 116.
• 11 Paul Ignotus: Hungary. New York, 1972. p. 60.
• 12 Robert Walsh: Narrative of a Journey from Constantinople to England. London, 1832. p. 302.
• 13 John Paget: Hungary and Transylvania (2 Vols.). London 1839. Vol. 1. pp. 120–121.
• 14 For a detailed examination of the synthesis achieved between Romanticism and the empiricism of the Enlightenment, see Mihály Szegedy-Maszák: "Enlightenment and Liberalism in the Works of Széchenyi, Kemény and Eötvös" (from which this remark is taken) in: Hungary and European Civilisation, Ed. György Ránki. Budapest. p. 24.